Safety Harbor culture
The Safety Harbor people were organized into chiefdoms and lived primarily in villages along the shoreline of Tampa Bay and the adjacent Gulf of Mexico coast.
The Spanish reported that the chief and his family resided on the main mound, and that a "temple" (probably a charnel house) stood on the opposite side of the plaza.
Bullen described it as running from Tarpon Springs to Sarasota, with some evidence that it reached the Aucilla River to the north and Charlotte Harbor to the south.
Milanich ascribes the presence of such objects to trade, but states that future work may clarify the relationship of the Safety Harbor and Caloosahatchee cultures.
[9][10] Changes in decorated ceramics and the presence of European artifacts support a division of the Safety Harbor culture into four phases.
[11] The Safety Harbor culture is defined by the presence of burial mounds with ceramics decorated with a distinctive set of designs and symbols.
Ceramics found elsewhere at Safety Harbor sites (in middens and village living areas) are almost always undecorated.
They suggest that this site was the center for a distinct cultural and political system oriented to the Peace River valley.
[30][31] Luer and Almy used the reported height, shape and dimensions of thirteen of the temple mounds to calculate their volume.
Class B, including the Safety Harbor and Bayshore Homes temple mounds, had high volumes of 6500 to 6900 m³, were tall (greater than 5 m), and had a summit platform 440 to 760 m² in area.
[13][14][34][35][36] The Tocobaga kept the bodies of recently dead people in their temples or charnel houses until the bones had been cleaned.
The Spanish visitors described the bodies as being wrapped in painted deer hides and stored in wooden boxes sitting on the ground.
One of the Spanish captives of the Tocobaga reported that he had been assigned to guard a temple at night to keep wolves from carrying off the bodies.
A Spanish account of a chief's funeral states that his body was "broken up" and placed in large jars, and the flesh was removed from the bones over two days.
Pottery used in daily life was largely undecorated, but ceremonial vessels (found in burials) were distinctively decorated (the defining characteristic of the Safety Harbor culture).
[41] The name "Tocobaga" is often used to refer to all of the indigenous peoples of the Tampa Bay area during the first Spanish colonial period (1513-1763).
In a strict sense, Tocobaga was the name of a chiefdom, its main town, and its chief, all of which were probably centered at the Safety Harbor site at the north end of Old Tampa Bay.
[3][42][43][44] The accounts of the de Soto expedition (which do not mention Tocobaga) state that Mocoso and Uzita were subject to a chief called Urriparacoxi or Paracoxi, who lived 30 leagues east or northeast of Tampa Bay.
The chiefdom of Tocobaga was apparently the major power in the Tampa Bay area during the later half of the 16th century, especially at the time of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés's visit in 1567.
[3][45][46][47] By around 1700, however, the Safety Harbor culture had virtually disappeared due to disease and incursions by other Native Americans from the north.
